Debate at the Lane Seminary, Cincinnati

This pamphlet was produced by an anti-slavery society, containing the three documents listed in the title; all from the early 1830s on the subject of slavery. Two of them are largely about the pros and cons of ‘colonization'; the then-popular project to settle freed slaves in Liberia, Africa.

Lane seminary, the site of the 1834 debate described in the first letter, was near Cincinnati. The two questions debated there were: “Ought the people of the Slaveholding States to abolish Slavery immediately?” and “Are the doctrines, tendencies, and measures of the American Colonization Society, and the influence of its principal supporters, such as render it worthy of the Christian Public?”

The speech by James Thome, a delegate of the Lane Seminary to the Anti-Slavery Society in New York, describes his own experience as a member of a slave-holding family in Kentucky and gives an insiders’ view of the institution of slavery. The last document, a letter by Reverend Cox, addresses colonization. He had been a strong advocate in favor of it, but had eventually changed his mind. In this letter he explains why he came to oppose colonization.